TRAPS: Thisis a tough question because it’s a more clever and subtle way to get you toadmit to a weakness. You can’t dodge itby pretending you’ve never been criticized. Everybody has been. Yet it can bequite damaging to start admitting potential faults and failures that you’d justas soon leave buried.
Thisquestion is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction.
BEST ANSWERS: Begin by emphasizing the extremely positivefeedback you’ve gotten throughout your career and (if it’s true) that yourperformance reviews have been uniformly excellent.
Of course, noone is perfect and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve yourperformance. Then, give an example of anot-too-damaging learning experience from early in your career and relate theways this lesson has since helped you. This demonstrates that you learned from the experience and the lesson isnow one of the strongest breastplates in your suit of armor.
If you arepressed for a criticism from a recent position, choose something fairly trivialthat in no way is essential to your successful performance. Add that you’ve learned from this, too, andover the past several years/months, it’s no longer an area of concern becauseyou now make it a regular practice to…etc.
Another wayto answer this question would be to describe your intention to broaden yourmaster of an area of growing importance in your field. For example, this might be a computer programyou’ve been meaning to sit down and learn… a new management technique you’veread about…or perhaps attending a seminar on some cutting-edge branch of yourprofession.
Again, thekey is to focus on something not essential to your brilliant performance butwhich adds yet another dimension to your already impressive knowledge base.
